Waltz with Bashir

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Provocative, hallucinatory, incendiary, this devastating animated documentary is unlike any Israeli film you've seen. More than that, in its seamless mixing of the real and the surreal, the personal and the political, animation and live action, it's unlike any film you've seen, period.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

An absolute stunner, a feature-length animated documentary, from Israel, in which the force of moving drawings amplifies eerily powerful accounts of war, shaky remembrance and rock-solid repression.

Empire Dan Jolin

A bravura documentary which balances the personal and the political as it peers into the First Lebanon War, its animated approach never feeling like a novelty. Astonishing, unforgettable: you have to see it.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

Waltz With Bashir has transcended the definitions of ''cartoon'' or ''war documentary'' to be classified as its own brilliant invention.

San Francisco Chronicle Jonathan Curiel

The best movie of 2008? The most revealing war film ever made? The greatest animated feature to come out of Israel? All these descriptions could apply to Waltz With Bashir.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

Waltz With Bashir is a supremely courageous act, not only as a piece of filmmaking, but much more so as a moral testament.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

It has taken an animated film to go where live-action dramas and even documentaries haven't--to tickle our synapses and slip into our bloodstream.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

It is personal filmmaking of the highest order, recognized with an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

This psycho-thriller, a Golden Globe winner and presumptive favorite for the foreign-film Oscar, itself is revelatory.

Washington Post John Anderson

A thinking person's horror movie, about real horror and horrifying echoes: The parallels between the Holocaust and the massacres are pronounced.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

What begins as an introspective odyssey examining the effects of war on the young Israeli soldiers turns into a provocative exposé on the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Views war from the inside out and the outside in. It carries the shock of full disclosure.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

It's encouraging to see a nation so aware of its public image and defensive about its military decisions examine a dark day in its history.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

The film ends on an absolutely sick-making note, with live-action footage of the massacre and its aftermath.

Newsweek David Ansen

The images of war that Folman and his chief illustrator, David Polonsky, conjure up have a feverish, infernal beauty. Dreams and reality jumble together.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

A memoir, a history lesson, a combat picture, a piece of investigative journalism and an altogether amazing film.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

The results, in my judgment, are stunning...and at certain moments during the film I wondered whether I had myself fallen asleep and was dreaming its hellish, haunted images.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Be forewarned: Folman closes his film with a grisly, real-death denouement that may give you some nightmares of your own. As well it should.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Waltz With Bashir isn't only a harrowing anti-war plea, it is also an eloquent and deeply moving argument that it is critical to never forget human atrocity, lest the past be repeated.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Waltz With Bashir not only breathes but it howls - and sobs and curses and croons and, in the end, when sound proves useless in the face of calamity, falls into awful silence.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Folman is an Israeli documentarian who has not worked in animation. Now he uses it as the best way to reconstruct memories, fantasies, hallucinations, possibilities, past and present. This film would be nearly impossible to make any other way.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Get ready to be knocked for a loop.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Haunting is the best word for Waltz With Bashir, a striking animated documentary - not an oxy moron, despite how it sounds - from Israel.

Film Threat Scott Mendelson

The tragic, violent true-life tale that concerns Waltz with Bashir is rendered even more powerful in animated form than it would likely have in life-action.

New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman

This animated documentary, from former Israeli soldier Ari Folman, blends both tactics to devastating effect. Perhaps only animation could give us the distance that makes his subject bearable: the personal cost of his own participation in the 1982 Lebanon War.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Ari Folman's broodingly original Waltz With Bashir -- one of the highlights of the last New York Film Festival -- is a documentary that seems only possible, not to mention bearable, as an animated feature.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

Ari Folman, the director of Waltz with Bashir, has made a movie so unusual that it overflows any box in which you try to contain it. Call it an adult psycho-documentary combat cartoon and you're halfway there.

Chicago Reader Andrea Gronvall

Animation may be the ideal medium for replicating dreams, and in this unsettling feature by Ari Folman it also proves well suited to autobiography.

Variety Leslie Felperin

It's these surreal touches, deployed with tactical restraint, that make the picture extraordinary and convey the febrile atmosphere of warfare, where by fear, horror -- and later guilt -- distort and distend perception and memory.

USA Today Claudia Puig

This is a powerful, poignant and provocative film, told in an unconventional and effective fashion.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Tasha Robinson

The trouble with Bashir’s extraordinary technique is that it lacks the confrontational realism of live footage; the extreme stylization of the animation can be distancing, making it hard to relate the images to real events and people. But that’s also part of Folman’s point.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Profound, and profoundly affecting.

The Hollywood Reporter Peter Brunette

The chosen style of animation leads to a distracting choppiness that renders the movements, gestures and facial expressions of the interviewees unconvincing. The other problem is that, memory naturally being something that returns in fits and starts, the film is rarely able to sustain any consistent narrative thrust.